Friday, November 25, 2016

My name is John P. Daly; John Anthony Daly, the author of this blog, was my father. He passed away in the small hours of the morning on Monday, November 21.

He suffered from a neurological condition described as Multiple System Atrophy - and you can probably trace the course of the illness by the volume of posts on the blog over the last year or so. Neither he nor his family really understood the extent of the problem until springtime; we knew he was having trouble walking, and he found his thinking to be less clear than he usually required it to be, but none of it seemed calamitous until around March.

By April, though, he was suffering from dementia; by the time the disease was successfully diagnosed, he was too far gone to say his goodbyes here - or even to remember that he would have wanted to. I should have stepped in sooner, just to explain the silence, and I'm sorry I didn't.

This blog was one of the great passions of Dad's life, post-retirement. I don't think I can really express how honored he was to be read as widely as he was, nor how much he enjoyed interacting with his readers. You brought out some of the best in him, and my mother and I will always be grateful.

I'm sorry we're all going to be denied his insights from here on in. I'm sorry we're missing out on his passions, and his belief in rationality and principle and unapologetic international fellowship; it seems like we as a world are in more need of all that, in general, than we have been for quite some time.

'For the last fifty-two years, leaders from around the world have gathered inMunichfor an annual review of world security problems. This year's discussion focused on the civil war in Syria. Not only is Syria a political and humanitarian crisis in the Middle East, but the refugee flows from that war are causing a political crisis in Europe. Some observers foresee the unraveling of the Schengen zone for free movement of peoples that has become a major accomplishment of European unity. In contrast, last year the focus in Munich was on Russian aggression against Ukraine. Ironically, it was easier to garner a consensus about a Western response to that threat. Behind both topics, however, lies the question of what Russia wants. At the same Munich Security Conference in 2007, Vladimir Putin had warned of a more assertive Russian policy against the West.

Last weekend, I listened as Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev told the conference that the world has "fallen into a new Cold War" for which he blamed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This came despite the fact that just a few days earlier, Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had met with others to try to arrange a ceasefire in Syria....